Woman shares what she experienced in marriage that made her realise she was just a 'baby-making machine'
Woman shares what she experienced in marriage that made her realise she was just a 'baby-making machine'
A woman has shared how she came to the realisation that she was just considered a baby-making machine in her marriage.
Ogechi Laura Amajuoyi narrated how she met her husband in February 2016 and was already pregnant for him three months later by May 2016. At the time, she said she did not know his age or that he had been married before and divorced.
She married him soon after and began giving birth while she was still a university student.
However, she claims she carried all three pregnancies alone with little or no support from her children's father and his family.
Sharing her story on Facebook, she wrote: "One of the pains I carry to this day is the fact that I was nothing but a baby-making machine to the family I married into.
"I carried all three of my pregnancies alone. My first, I carried while I was still a student at UNN, tummy growing while I kept up with my regular school activities. It's thanks to my mother that dropping out never became the answer.
"My second, I carried during my final months in UNN in the year 2018 and during NYSC preparations, the "compulsory" youth service program every Nigerian graduate goes through.
"My third, I was mostly just at home, and I found out I was pregnant the morning after a night I had slept outside, locked out of a place I was supposed to call home, after a fight with my husband.
"Three pregnancies. No husband rubbed my feet. No husband massaged my tummy. No husband showed up for any of it. I did every single one of them without a husband, physically and emotionally, from the nausea to the labor to the recovery.
"For the first two deliveries, he was technically there. He came to the government hospital(Parklane, Enugu), since that's not a private ward where a husband can stay through the night, he wasn't allowed to anyway. There was a man who stayed the night with the mother of his child irrespective of whatever anyone thought. I remember wishing my husband had cared enough to do the same. But mine was in a hurry to leave almost as soon as he arrived.
"He'd go meet his friends, the same crowd that regularly kept him out until two in the morning, that's a story for another day, and go brag to them that his wife had just given birth, while I was left to handle the entire aftermath by myself.
"I've seen men who stayed by their wives' sides through the whole night with their newborn. That wasn't my story. My supposed husband was somewhere drinking Heineken and eating fish with people who, in the grand scheme of things, meant nothing.
"And still, somebody else felt entitled to name the children I carried through all of that by myself.
"I say this because I still can't explain, in any logical way, why my ex-mother-in-law believed it was her fundamental human right to name every child I carried in my own womb. Not a request. A right. As if my body did the carrying, alone, so her family could do the naming.
"The worst of it was the name she chose for my last baby: Ifunanya. It means love in our language. That name also belongs to another woman, one my ex-husband was involved with at one point in time, who stayed somewhere around New Haven in Enugu. I don't know if my mother-in-law remembered that when she insisted on it. I don't know if it would have mattered to her if she had.
"I complained to her about that affair. Her response wasn't to hold her son accountable. She didn't ask him a single question. Instead, she told me a story about how her own husband had done the exact same thing to her, as if that history was supposed to comfort me, or prepare me, or quiet me. It did none of those things. It just told me everything about what she'd normalized in her own marriage, and what she now expected me to normalize in mine.
"That's my real takeaway from all of this. Women who spend their marriages absorbing the failures of irresponsible men aren't just enduring something privately. They're raising the next version of it. Their sons grow up watching what their fathers got away with, and they learn it's survivable, maybe even normal. And when those sons marry, their mothers expect the new wife to carry the same weight they carried, because if I took it, why can't you.
"That's how the cycle stays a cycle. Not because anyone is forced to keep it going, but because everyone around it agrees to call it strength.
"There has never been a point in my life where I believed a toxic two-parent household does more for a child than a peaceful one-parent household. Even watching my own parents, there were times I wished they had separated. A child doesn't need two parents under one roof. They need at least one parent who isn't teaching them, by example, what to accept.
"My name is Ogechi Amajuoyi, and this is one of the sacrifices I carry that I no longer call noble."
- Linda Ikeji's Blog Original article
